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Pheromones lead meat ants across water

Meat ants cross a water way between their nest and foraging area laying pheromones. Eventually the ants will be directed by the strongest pheromones trail to the successful path. (Vision courtesy Eliza Middleton, Sydney University)

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Pheromones lead meat ants across water

Meat ants cross a water way between their nest and foraging area laying pheromones. Eventually the ants will be directed by the strongest pheromones trail to the successful path. (Vision courtesy Eliza Middleton, Sydney University)

The business of foraging for food, building nests and trails and growing colonies were all skills from which city planners could learn.

"I think of insects as efficient, almost intelligent, in some ways," Sydney University biologist Eliza Middleton said. "We could use the lessons from these creatures to inform and improve our town planning."

By studying the behaviour of bees, town planners may learn a thing of two. Photo: Ben Rushton

An ant colony, for example, might be trading off between the costs of efficiency and redundancy, said Dr Middleton, who reviewed a range of insect studies for an upcoming publication.

In the ant known as Lasius niger, traffic congestion was prevented by actively redirecting traffic to additional trails, she explained.

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"If humans could develop a similar strategy, perhaps as a part of our online navigation systems – think of Google Maps – we could achieve a more even spread of traffic across our road networks," Dr Middleton said. "In this way, we could potentially lower or prevent congestion in some areas."

The lessons to be learnt from the social insect realm did not end there.

Ants may provide some of the answers that elude our best minds. Photo: SMH contributor

"In honeybees, individuals can mature faster to help with foraging tasks earlier in life if workers are lost," Dr Middleton said. "This could be useful in human infrastructure if our systems had a level of flexibility that allowed units to be temporarily reassigned to other tasks in the event of a disturbance."

Honeybees resist the degradation of their communication networks using anything from a waggle dance to auditory, vibrational, tactile and olfactory cues.

"In a human system, the presence of inactive servers or power grids would allow us to better respond to disturbances, such as a natural disaster, as the inactive units become activated," Dr Middleton said.

This comes at a price. The high cost of building and maintaining such technologies needed to be weighed against the potential benefit of such systems, she cautioned.

"With the rise of 'smart' electronics and appliances that can collect and exchange data, our infrastructure systems are becoming more self-organised and less centralised," she said. This is also observed in social insect systems.

So how do we build self-healing systems that respond quickly to damage? The answer, she believes, might lie in the self-healing nature of ant trails of pheromones, chemical substances used in communicating.